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I see the chat volume has picked up, so hopefully that means that most of the problems had been solved. I am sure there are a few lingering problems, but it is slowly looking better.

If you are still having issues, please let me know and I will try to get them solved. The sounds issue may have something to do with a browser setting on your side. So let me know and I will try to direct you to where you can make adjustments.

Well I installed a new chat engine. This work different than the other one. It has a wealth of new features.

You can click on a online users name and share files with them, engage in private chat, and other cool stuff.

Also you can customiize the chat room to your own liking. Colors, background, and other stuff like that.

Let me know what you guys think.

Kev, I posted this in the chat room a few minutes ago

":bball:Kev - although no one else is on at the moment from the time I was on earlier today the new chatroom looks great. Thanks for everything you're doing for us all."

I then came back into packardinfo.com to look at the forums again and found I could do that but there was no facility there to reply and some of the function buttons had "disappeared" like the green back and forward arrows near the top left of the page. Also the up and down sidebar at the right side instead of having arrows had the numbers 5 and 6 instead of arrows. I'm sure there would be other things to. Appears the change in chatrooms has affected the setup of other things.

I got around this by closing everything down and coming back in the packardinfo.com afresh.

Fraid you may have to massage a few things for us again.

PS - I've got sound now on the laptop, tech support #1 Son, told me how to turn it on and up!

"The Luddite"

Kev,

Help.

I did some "testing" with Flashchat and packardinfo.com and I recorded it in Flashchat. Can you retrieve what was posted there? Because when I close and then re-open flashchat, unlike the previous chatroom, there are no current chats displayed.

Anyway the basis of my findings is that if Flashchat is closed packardinfo.com appears unaffected. While if you leave Flashchat open the problems mentioned in my previous post to this thread are apparent.

And another thing - When I last tried to close Flashchat everything froze on my laptop. This also happened just after you left the chatroom earlier. So I suspect this is a problem too. Anyone else have this happen to them?

I think thats enough for now because it looks like Kev will be very busy again

Thanks in anticipation

"The Luddite"

The Flash Chat is not really integrated into the website like the old one was. As the name suggests it runs as a Adobe Flash Progam in your browser. The website simple passes your login information to the Flash Chat automatically.

Now what may have happened is that if you were in FlashChat for a long time, and not moving around in the actual website, then the website may have timeout your login due to inactivity. Hence why your New Post and Reply buttons disappeared. As non-logged in users cannot post or reply.

If you notice weird issues in actual FlashChat then the first thing I would suggest is to make sure you have the latest Adobe Flash player/updates.

You all are learning as I do on this. I just got this up and running last night, so I have not had a chance to flush out any demons that may be lurking. But the actual FlashChat should not affect the working of the Website in anyway as they are two complete seperate systems.

Also this chat room works like other ones, where it only shows current chat activity. So as long as you are logged into chat, you will see the entire history going back to the point you logged in. But if you log out, then this reset. This is due to the fact that the local client is caching the chat, not the server. The folks I bought the FlashChat engine from have a version coming out soon that includes server caching, so you can see the previous chat that occured while you were not online. But this version is not available as of yet. I will get that online as soon as it is released.

One thing you can do, is simply log into the chat room, and set you status to "Away". Then you are still in the room, and you will be able to see all the chat history. But this may not be practical unless you are on a "always on" type internet connection.

Well I did a little research and figured out a hack to show some previous chat history when you login. The window will now show you the last 10-20 messages that were post from the previous 16hrs or so. This does cause a slight delay in the initial opening of the chat room as it has check the database and load that previous history.

Hopefully this will let everyone know what is happening in the chat room when they login.

Kev,

I now think the problems I've been having are related to the laptop I have. I've only had it for about a week and so this morning I jumped on my wife's PC and everything has worked like a charm. So this will mean some more work for my tech support, #1 Son, to help sort it out for me.

Sorry to have put you to so much trouble when the fault lies at my end of the world.

Mal, no problem. I knew that the other chat engine was buggy, and I was asking it to do more than it was designed for.

Have your son update the version of Adobe Flash that is on your laptop, and I bet it will work like a charm. Also have him install any needed Windows and IE updates. Sometimes that can fix a sticky wicket.

BigKev,

A big vote of thanks for all you've done. Again sorry for putting you through it.

As for the sticky wicket - I'm amazed! An apt description and from the land of baseball no less! I'll try to play a straight bat from now on.

Well I was born in the U.K. and grew up in the U.S.

So everyone once in awhile U.K. background comes out. I always tell people I speak two languages; American, and English.